NASA Successfully Eliminates the 1998 El Nino

Has anyone looked at the recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis? A chart of it was used in a recent Australian Broadcasting Company debate on global warming to make the case that surface temperatures have risen continuously during the past 20 years.

There’s a pretty blatant problem with the NASA chart, however. And it’s a fault that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of climate studies would recognize.

The NASA GISS analysis essentially eliminates the 1998 El Niño. Instead of the ’98 El Niño towering above neighboring years, thanks to its massive release of stored Pacific Ocean heat content, 1998 is simply depicted as one rung on an ever-climbing temperature ladder. And then, suddenly, there’s 2016, with an El Niño that explodes far above all of the preceding years.

If one hasn’t studied any recent climate data, then the chart looks plausible. After all, it was produced by NASA…

But the NASA GISS analysis contradicts every other recent measure of global temperatures. Specifically, the 1998 El Niño produced a major spike in temperature readings and one that the 2016 El Niño has been hard-pressed to beat. (An intervening El Niño in 2010 was far smaller by comparison.) But net global temperatures essentially flatlined in the intervening period of 1998-2016.

None of this is discernible in the NASA GISS analysis, however. And so, it’s disturbing that NASA is promoting such a graph—and that climate alarmists are using it without either knowing or caring that it is based on a very distorted representation of temperature data.

This sort of deception isn’t a complete surprise, though, given the questionable study published last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But it reveals the degree to which academic and government elites will pursue their own agenda at the expense of institutional honesty.

Ron Clutz

H.B. Schmidt

Even if they ARE using that graph analysis Ron, it doesn’t match with the GISTEMP map scale. According to them, in 1980 there was only a 0,2°C anomaly and in 2015 there was a 0,9°C anomaly. Their data shows 2015 to be anomalous by 1,2°C in the data graph you provide from them. So something isn’t matching up, whether it’s a different base period or whatnot. 1998 was so anomalously high as to have birthed nearly two decades of argumentation over what caused The Pause, validated in the UN IPCC 2007 and 2012 reports. How then can the super El Niño event of 1998 be scrubbed from the temperature record if not due to bias and outright fraud?

Gator

Yep moon landing real, CAGW not so much. Alarmists have nothing but models, artifacts, and the backing of leftists.

Moshpup, how much does UHI effect temperature? What is the proper adjustment for UHI? Hmmm?

Please do me two favors.

1- List all climate forcings, order them from most to least effectual, and then quantify them all.

2- Please provide even one peer reviewed paper that refutes natural variability as the cause of recent, or any, global climate changes.

There is nothing unusual or unprecedented about our climate, or how we got here. For 4,500,000,000 years climates have always changed, naturally. This means there has been a set precedent, and the burden of proof falls on natural climate change deniers like yourself.

kevin king

We landed on the moon alright and it was no thanks to any of our ‘climate scientists’. I doubt very many of them would be capable of mastering the basic Newtonian physics involved, since they clearly have no idea what real science is.You clearly don’t either, so here’s some instructive educational material for you. Now go away and learn 101 for Sciencehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY
and here , pay particular attention to this part
‘it’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.’http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

I passed you a copy of my Q&A question last night and links to my website http://climate-change-theory.com and my blog https://itsnotco2.wordpress.com where I have offered a reward of $10,000 for the first to prove my hypothesis substantially wrong and produce a counter study to mine that showed water vapour cools. If the IPCC were right about the greenhouse gas water vapour doing most of “33 degrees of warming” with an average concentration of just over 1%, then we should expect rain forests with 4% water vapour above them to be at least 50 degrees hotter than dry deserts at similar latitude and altitude.

I can detect that you have not studied the climatology texts such as Pierrehumbert’s “gold standard” book used in climatology “Atmospheric Physics 101” courses – about the only physics they ever learn.

Below is a copy of my review of the Q&A program that I have emailed to over 100 politicians and the physics departments of major universities throughout Australia, as well as to the Q&A team. See also Joanne Nova’s climate blog which is the most popular one of its kind in Australia, where 54% of the population are climate skeptics, not that this proves anything I would agree.

Below is a question I submitted for yourself which was rejected by the ABC Q&A program as it obviously tied them in knots, as it would have yourself. I’m interested to see if you reply here.

Doug Cotton
author of the book “Why It’s Not Carbon Dioxide After All” on Amazon …
(awarded a scholarship by the Physics Dept of Sydney University in the 1960’s)

NASA “Energy diagrams” show Solar radiation being boosted by about twice as much radiation from our atmosphere, and they imply that the total can be used to explain the Earth’s surface temperature*. But physics tells us that two different fluxes like that cannot be added to determine some combined warming effect, so I’m wondering how they justify this tampering with the laws of physics?

* In detail, see such a diagram on the ‘PSI errors’ page on my website http://climate-change-theory.com and note the net “energy” into the surface is (324+168-102) = 390W/m^2. Then use Stefan-Boltzmann to deduce that the blackbody temperature (for uniform flux with a Planck function from a single blackbody source) is indeed 288K – about the mean surface temperature. In fact variable flux from a closer Sun with a mean of 390W/m^2 would produce a mean temperature about 10 degrees colder. But the atmospheric radiation should not have been included. All the radiation in any direction between the cooler atmosphere and the warmer surface does is to cause heat transfer out of the surface and to have a cooling effect on the surface and warming effect on the atmosphere. You MUST know that you cannot add just the input radiation from the atmosphere (overstated at 324W/m^2 anyway) to the solar radiation of 168W/m^2 for use with Stefan Boltzmann calculations. The Planck functions barely overlap just for starters, so how would you get a temperature based on a peak frequency as per Wien’s Displacement Law? Radiation just doesn’t work like that. It gets pseudo-scattered by warmer targets. It’s energy becomes part of the outward “quota” of radiation by the warmer target. Electrons are raised through quantum states and immediately fall back emitting an identical photon. The energy never becomes kinetic energy, because if it did then it could escape by conduction, for example, and the Second Law would have been violated. (See my 2012 paper “Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” linked from the ‘Evidence’ page of the above website.) If one electric bar radiator can raise an object to 350K, will 16 such radiators raise it to 700K? Yes or no? If you agree “no” then you implicitly agree that the whole IPCC radiative forcing conjecture is based on fictitious, fiddled physics.

Gator

My bottom line assessment is this. I think that uncertainties in global surface temperature anomalies is substantially understated. The surface temperature data sets that I have confidence in are the UK group and also Berkeley Earth. This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target. So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.

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Recent Comments

Aido

It gets even more dodgy. The ‘anomalies’ are differences from a 30-year average, referred to as the ‘norm’.. 1930-1960, then 1960-1990, which is the current ‘norm’. If you took 1940-1970, or 1950-1980 as the ‘norm’, you’d get different figures. How anyone falls for this beats me.

Amber

Ricky C
About 60 million voters would likely agree with you . Some people like to rescue pit bulls to because they figure they can “fix ‘ them .
Donald Trump doesn’t need one of his top enemies buttering up his daughter
to help sell a scary global warming scam .
Gore , Podesta , and Steyer are the best of pals and would love nothing more than to have a direct pipeline into Trump to help bring him down . Stating the obvious ,
they mean him absolutely no good and will do every thing they can to wreck his Presidency one way or the other .
Lets hope Ivanka dedicates her influence and smarts to help real people and solve real problems .
Stein got 1 % of the vote for a reason . The global warming con game is over .

amirlach

Ricky C

She better not. Just like its said, everyone worked very hard, myself particularly to get the waste out of the “Climate Change” feeding trough for consultants who do nothing for the economy. If I want to make sure my medical supplies at a local hospital in third world countries that I visit are modern and effective, their economy has to be booming, not cut down by giving money to international Climate Change hustlers.

JayPee

Dale

I don’t know whether or not Tim Ball actually made the above posting but if so, it’s in very poor taste and severely weakens his potential as a climate authority. Spamming web sites (I’ve seen this several times before on other sites) is not the way to gather interest or respect. People usually ignore such spam and laugh it off as just another fly-by-night.
I’ve read many of Tim Ball’s articles and have heard him speak via video. He has too much to offer to stoop to this low level nonsense, if this posting is indeed from Tim Ball.